Productivity: where do we stand?

Comparisons of material living standards across time and across countries are fraught with measurement problems.

No one seriously questions that 100 years ago we had some of the very highest material living standards, and equally no one really questions that we are a long way off that mark now. Some want to focus instead on wellbeing indicators. That is a topic for another day, but a country that has as many of its own people leaving as New Zealand has had, shouldn’t be seeking to rest on its laurels.

Historical estimates are fairly imprecise, and only available for a small number of variables (typically GDP per capita). For more recent periods, we have much more, and better-measured, data – although always less than researchers and analysts might want – but even then we face problems in comparing outcomes from country to country. All of which suggests one shouldn’t put much weight on small differences – they might just represent imprecise measurement and translation.

GDP per capita

The most common comparative metric is still GDP per capita. It has all sorts of problems, but one in particular is that there is huge variation across countries in how many hours the population works on average. If people in one country on average work twice as many hours as those in another country then, all else equal, the people in the first country will have higher incomes. That provides greater consumption opportunities, but isn’t much of a reflection of the productivity levels being achieved by firms in the countries concerned. For that, the best indicator that is reasonably widely available is GDP per hour worked. It is also much less affected by business cycles than GDP per capita. For international comparisons, one needs to convert the various estimates into a common currency, not at market exchange rates but at (estimated) purchasing power parity exchange rates.

For many countries there are no worthwhile estimates of GDP per hour worked. But the OECD has data for all its member countries (and a few others) and the Conference Board produces estimates for a wider range of countries, going back a little further in history. For the most recent years, they now have estimates for 68 countries. Here is a (long) chart of the 2014 estimates.

I’ve highlighted New Zealand and the countries estimated to have had GDP per capita 10 per cent either side of us. That range both recognizes the inevitable measurement imprecision, but also highlights the countries that have a broadly similar level of labour productivity to our own. It is a mixed bag: Cyprus, Japan, Slovenia, Slovakia, Malta, Israel, Greece. But none were ever – well, perhaps not for a couple thousand years in Greece’s case – world leaders. (I haven’t shown the OECD version but the rankings are similar – and Cyprus and Malta aren’t in the OECD).

If the New Zealand numbers are not perhaps quite “middle income” country levels yet, they seem uncomfortably close to them. And they are a huge distance behind those (mostly Northern European) top-tier countries, from Belgium to Switzerland.

If it had always been so, that might be one thing. Many of the middling countries have always been middling countries. But we weren’t. GDP per capita isn’t GDP per hour worked, but it is fairly safe to assume that our productivity levels 100 years ago would have been among the highest in the world. And much more recently than that, the Conference Board has estimates for a reasonable range of advanced and emerging countries going back decades.

Disappointing progress

By 1960, New Zealand experts were already writing serious reports on our disappointing productivity growth performance. But then only United States and Venezuela (all that oil) were estimated to have had GDP per hour worked more than 10 per cent higher than New Zealand. In the space of less than one lifetime – and this is more or less my lifetime – our productivity levels have gone from still among the best in world, to lost among the rest. These sorts of declines aren’t normal phenomena. They typically happen when countries mess themselves up badly – think of Venezuela or Argentina, or even Zimbabwe. And, critical as I am of economic policymaking in New Zealand over 50 years, we’ve been a moderately well-functioning country (stable democracy, rule of law etc).

It isn’t that nothing has been done in response to our decline. We stopped doing a lot of what a commenter yesterday aptly called “dumb stuff” – the protection and subsidies that shaped our economy from the late 1930s to the 1980s. But we’ve done our share of other dumb stuff – all well-intentioned. The Think Big energy projects of the 1980s were an example. I class throwing open the immigration doors again 25 years ago in that same category – a new Think Big. A catastrophic decline in relative productivity here was, surely, a signal for resources to go elsewhere – and New Zealanders responded to that signal en masse (as, within New Zealand, people have moved away from places – perfectly pleasant places – like Invercargill, Wanganui, or Taihape as the relative returns have changed). So what possesses our bureaucratic and political elites to think that a path back to prosperity and higher productivity involved searching out and bringing lots and lots more people? If it was perhaps a pardonable error 25 years ago, it is an inexcusable policy failure now.

And then there are the totally flaky ideas that never actually amount to much: turning New Zealand into a financial services hub, R&D subsidies, becoming rich on back of wealthy Europeans fleeing terrorism, and so on. And if that looks like a criticism of the current Prime Minister, he isn’t obviously worse – more practically indifferent to the real issues – than his predecessors, or his potential successors. I watched Q&A interviews with James Shaw and Andrew Little at the weekend, and there was nothing there which gave me any hope that our political leaders even care much any more about our precipitous decline. Bank-bashing seemed easier no doubt.

What we once had

We can’t, and shouldn’t try, to turn back the clock to 1910, or even (worse) 1960. But we shouldn’t lose sight of what we once had here, or give up believing that we can produce incomes for our people once again as good as those almost anywhere in the world. Governments don’t make countries rich – firms and individuals, ideas and opportunities do that – but governments can stand in the way. I’ve been asked a few times in the last few days what policy remedies I’d suggest. There are lots of smaller issues, but here are my big three:

Stop bringing in anywhere near as many non-New Zealand migrants. At a third of our current target for residence approvals, we’d still have about the same rate of legal migration as the United States.

Stop taxing business income anywhere near so heavily. We need more business investment to have any hope of reversing our decline, and heavy taxes on returns to investment aren’t the way to get more of it. The tax system should rely more on consumption taxes.

Stop stopping people using their own land to build (low rise) houses, pretty much as and where they like.

It is a mix that would produce lower real interest rates (relative to the rest of the world), a lower real exchange rate, a lower cost of capital, lower population growth, and lower house prices. Plenty more innovative outward-oriented New Zealand firms – I heard Steven Joyce talking about them on the radio this morning – would find that a rewarding climate to invest and export, supporting better productivity and income prospects for all of us. Will we match Belgium, the US, and Ireland (see first chart)? Well, perhaps not, but who knows – for all our locational disadvantages, we do plenty of things better than those countries. But we certainly really should be able to do much better than Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia and Greece, if we are willing to take the issue, and challenge, seriously.

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